Microsoft has spent time producing quantifiable editing performance improvements. By using an approach that combines an "Immediate Delay Tracker" and Event Tracing for Windows, solid gains have been reported.

Today Microsoft announced the availability of Visual Studio 2012 Release Candidate with .NET 4.5, formerly known as “Visual Studio 11”. This release includes performance improvements, a more "Metro-style" user interface, customized installation, and new Team Foundation Server features.

Microsoft has announced its full Visual Studio 11 lineup, including some changes to how it manages the Express Editions. Windows XP continues to fade into the past as VS11 will provide limited support for this platform.

Developers have long requested C99 language support for Visual Studio. Microsoft's Herb Sutter indicates this will not be forthcoming with VS11 and proposes two solutions: using ISO C++ compliant code or switch to a competitor's compiler.

Microsoft announced the new Async Targeting Pack for Visual Studio 11 Beta, which will allow developers to use asynchronous programming features in .NET 4 or Silverlight 5 applications. These features were previously provided in the Async CTP, which is now deprecated.

Web Workbench, the extension that brings Sass, LESS, and Coffeescript to Visual Studio, has been updated. This release adds support for Visual Studio 11, improvements to the import process and collapsible outlining for CoffeeScript.

Despite a recent emphasis on Windows 8 Metro, Microsoft has renewed its pledge to support MFC which they call “the most fully-featured library for building native desktop applications”. While there were no major features announced, a lot of effort was put in to bug fixes and general improvements.

A New Unit Test Explorer, ability to run tests on each build, better Code Coverage tool, support for third party frameworks, a new VS Fakes Framework, better performance and more are all coming together in Visual Studio 11 to provide much better Unit Testing experience for Developers.

NUnit, XUnit.net, QUnit, Jasmine, Chutzpah are all supported in the Visual Studio 11 Beta along with MSUnit, promising better choice and over-all unit-testing experience for developers. And the list is expected to get bigger towards the final release of VS 11.

InfoQ Weekly Newsletter

Join a community of over 250 K senior developers by signing up for our newsletter. If you are based in the EEA, please contact us so we can provide you with the protections afforded to you under EEA protection laws.

Is your profile up-to-date? Please take a moment to review and update.

Email Address

Note: If updating/changing your email, a validation request will be sent

Company name:

Keep current company name

Update Company name to:

Company role:

Keep current company role

Update company role to:

Company size:

Keep current company Size

Update company size to:

Country/Zone:

Keep current country/zone

Update country/zone to:

State/Province/Region:

Keep current state/province/region

Update state/province/region to:

Subscribe to our newsletter?

Subscribe to our architect newsletter?

Subscribe to our industry email notices?

By subscribing to this email, we may send you content based on your previous topic interests. See our privacy notice for details.

You will be sent an email to validate the new email address. This pop-up will close itself in a few moments.

We notice you're using an ad blocker

We understand why you use ad blockers. However to keep InfoQ free we need your support. InfoQ will not provide your data to third parties without individual opt-in consent. We only work with advertisers relevant to our readers. Please consider whitelisting us.